> The person using Firefox simply clicks "restart" and six seconds
> later is back where he or she left off and the system runs
> reliably again.
>
> Perhaps LibreOffice could adopt this mechanism; if it is not
> prepared to be updated while running, it could be adjusted to
> inotify a sentinal file to know to display a "please restart"
> dialog and button to avoid awkward interactions and crashes.
>
> ...

Mozilla has the resources to include this function. Perhaps the
LibreOffice team does too. But it's neither reasonable nor elegant to
expect every app to do it.

Even if they did, the UI should answer the question: "Or else what?"
If the situation was as you describe, so that the dialog would need to
say "LibreOffice might crash unless you restart it", it would be
mockingly obvious that not restarting shouldn't even be an option.

Anyway, the particular bug Bjoern cited apparently involved
LibreOffice crashing when a font is installed, not necessarily when
LibreOffice is updated. That both of those things often happen during
an Ubuntu upgrade is a coincidence. Requiring LibreOffice to be
restarted when it is updated might be a good idea in general, but it
wouldn't have solved this problem.